Fulcrum: Samuel Beckett as Poet

Special section in the new issue dedicated to Beckett and poetry

The current issue of Fulcrum (Number 6) features a special section devoted to Samuel Beckett and poetry. The issue includes critical essays by leading Beckett scholars, including S. E. Gontarski, Chris Ackerley, Marjorie Perloff, Christopher Ricks and Simon Critchley. There are also retrospective pieces by artists who knew Beckett personally, including Avigdor Arikha (who contributes two life drawings of the writer) and his wife, Anne Atik.

I read Jean-Michel Rabaté's contribution to the collection over the weekend and enjoyed it immensely.

A full list of the Beckett-related contents are as follows:

• Philip Nikolayev, Samuel Beckett’s Poetry: In Place of an Introduction
• Avigdor Arikha, Two Life Drawings of Samuel Beckett
• Anne Atik, Beckett’s Thesaurus
• Samuel Beckett, Ceiling
• Christopher Ricks, Note on Ceiling
• Christopher Ricks, Human Wishes and Ceiling
• S. E. Gontarski, Samuel Beckett’s “Imbedded” Poetry and the Critique of Genre
• Seán Lawlor, Beckett, MacGreevy and the Stink of Joyce; ‘Sanies I’: being careful not to take a serious view of their accidents
• David Wheatley, ‘Labours Unfinished’: Beckett’s Mirlitonnades and the Poetics of Incompletion
• Mark Nixon,“Unutterably Faint”: Beckett’s Late English Poetry
• Daniel Albright, Beckett’s Poems as Plays
• Jean-Michel Rabaté, Formal Brilliance and Indeterminate Purport: The Poetry of Beckett’s Philosophemes
• Simon Critchley, To be or not to be is not the question: Beckett’s Film
• Chris Ackerley, Fairy-tales and Flagellation: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Sanies II’
• Marjorie Perloff, “An Image from a Past Life”: Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn
• Eliot Weinberger, Beckett/Paz
• Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz on An Anthology of Mexican Poetry

To find out more about Fulcrum, including how to buy a copy, you can visit their official website by clicking here.